Siolfir

Umbral Blast is not Dark Blast. It's the Warshade primary.


Isn't that 7 for Stone Armor, then?

We're including power pools as full powersets? Because if so I'm thinking that Presence wins hands down.

And like I said in my post listing things, I only included the ones that I've played. There are some that I don't even want to play, but since I didn't even try them I didn't feel I could in good conscience list them. So you end up with some things skewing the numbers (like putting Demon Summoning on it ).

Nitpick: Earth Assault has Tremor for PBAoE, not just Mud Pots. It's definitely a special case, since it's built more like a melee set with an extra ranged attack than an assault secondary.

As an outside buff, yeah. But the only armor sets available to Brutes that don't contain a +maxHP buff are SR, Electric, Fire, and Dark... meaning more sets have it than not.

Oh, I don't mind the performance of any of the MM primaries that I listed. But those sets are the only MM primaries that I've tried, and of those I rank Demons last solely because of the noise.


It won't happen because tier swaps break too many things, but I personally think that Sleet and Frostworks should have been swapped when the set was originally created. Your lower tier powers are supposed to be the "bread and butter" powers of the set; Sleet is an "every spawn" power, and Frostworks is less so.

Ehh... maybe, with poor slotting choices and a small inspiration tray (minimum tray size for the event is 10, I assumed that it was 15). I've played Energy Aura, even before it was buffed - heck, one of the times was before IOs - and never had that much trouble with it though.

But then, I've also "tanked" Recluse on a STF with an Ice/Rad Corruptor while people took down the towers when the Invulnerability Tanker got two-shot and lost connection coming back from the hospital. Manipulation of the AI can be as useful - at times even more useful - than actually having a defensive powerset (which is why mez protection is so damned useful - you can't manipulate the AI if you can't act!).

Assuming that the situation actually is that bad and the Brute doesn't have the slotting and/or inspirations to carry himself through, then you're right - they should have handed the Brute some inspirations to stay alive with. But I would assume a competent player on a melee AT that at least has SOs would be able to stand up to a standard AV fight long enough to kill a damage-, resistance-, and regen-debuffed AV. And yes, the single-target chain should have been emphasized to preserve endurance but they didn't say they were spamming AoEs so I didn't assume that they were.

Yeah. And unlike Poison, Cold Domination doesn't suck in PvE. The only part of Cold Domination that sucks is that Dominators get Sleet at the same level as Corruptors and Controllers.

As for my "worst powersets in the game"... I haven't played all of them to 50. Some I just got sick of, some I don't like aesthetically and never tried. So of the ones that I've played:

Melee: Energy Melee. The best thing that it does is hit corpses of single targets after your teammates kill them, and it pays for being able to do that by doing damage to you while not damaging your target. It's arguably last in AoE damage only because Tremor's animation is so long (but Tremor's AoE is much larger so I'd personally put EM at last), has no reliable AoE mitigation, and is in the middle of the pack for single target damage if you use Energy Transfer as often as it recharges and deal with the self-damage penalty.

Defense: Super Reflexes. Not because it's bad, because it's not. But its sole focus (more defense) can be compensated for with IOs by every other set and what the other sets can do is harder, if not impossible, to compensate for with inventions.

Ranged: Beam Rifle. I wanted to like this set and had some points to spend but I guess I should have tried it out more when it was on beta. But even though I managed to get two Dual Pistols characters to 50 (a /MM Blaster and a /Traps Corruptor) I just can't bring myself to play the BR/DM Corruptor.

Manipulation: Electricity Manipulation. Because it's not Energy, Fire, or Mental and those are the other ones I've tried.

Buff/Debuff: Trick Arrow.

Control: Gravity Control. I haven't played it since the changes, but the power order is painful and I never managed to get past level 16 on any of the three that I've tried since Wormhole never struck me as being worth the pain of leveling one any further when every other set offered the same powers I was taking (because let's face it, Propel is fun but - unlike Phantom Army or Seeds of Confusion - it's not going to prop up a set on its own).

Summoning: Demons, because I've tried Bots, Thugs, and Demons and they just make too much noise. >.>

Except that -damage and -resistance isn't resisted by AV resistances - it's resisted by the target's damage resistance to that specific type - so EF is almost universally better than RI against AVs until you get into the ones with god modes.

As for your role on the team... debuff and destroy. If you're playing Radiation Emission on anything and someone complains that you're not healing, then they're just stupid. The heal is nice but it's simply a barely-effective band-aid for when the real strength of the set - the debuffs - fail and a patch-up before the next alpha. At level 29 the Brute wouldn't have Energize available to heal himself, but he would have an inspiration tray and the ability to combine them - and each green he uses will provide more hit points than your heal without using endurance that you didn't have in the first place. Or he could use purple inspirations to far greater effect than RI is providing against an AV to softcap himself for a minute at a time. Tell the Brute to stop being a noob and he won't die.

It used to be a flat 20% for both Scrappers and Stalkers - which was a high critical rate for Scrappers and low for Stalkers since it ignored hidden status and any scaling bonus - but was fixed for the actual Stalker crit rate a while after it went live (I think around a month?). It might have even had a patch note mentioning it but if you weren't playing a Stalker at the time it would have been easy to overlook, since it's only one power in one set for one AT and it came out of beta at a flat rate.

Except that's not how it's normally done, and phase shift isn't what makes you fade from view, it's what makes the attacks (unless your opponent also phases) not affect you at all - and note that if you're both phased, attacks will still work as if neither of you were phased. What makes you fade from view is having a PvP stealth higher than their perception at the range you are standing.

Like getting yourself to the stealth cap by using Stealth, a stealth IO, and Hide. And if they're a VEAT they can still see you at a good range (their perception cap is 1260', so a perception-capped VEAT can see a stealth-capped Stalker from over 110' away) and anything else can see you at 10'.


Stalker Placate has a +stealth affect (380' in PvP). That has nothing to do with your opponent not being able to target you, though; the reason that they can't target you is because they were Placated.

Uhm, sort of.

Super Speed doesn't provide stealth in PvP - and the trail actually makes you easier to spot if someone has enough perception to see you - but you're going to want it anyway so you can keep up with everyone else who does have it. To reiterate: it does nothing for your stealth in PvP, only PvE.

The Stalker PvP stealth cap is 1143' at level 50. Max perception for a non-VEAT is 1153', so if you're both at the cap they will still see you within 10'.

Hide (500') + Stealth IO from any of the sets (300') + Stealth (389') will cap your stealth and allow you to attack, albeit while reducing your speed.

Hide + Invisibility (611') won't let you attack, but will cap you for most levels without the stealth IO without a speed reduction - you'll still need the stealth IO to be capped in Grandville, though.

Yes, but Freeze Ray has a shorter recharge to go with its negligible damage. I didn't list Tesla Cage with the others for the same reason.

BFR is like the old Siphon Life - it was treated as a utility power, which means that it doesn't fit the formula for how much damage it does and it costs more endurance than the other powers listed above with the same recharge and - with the exception of Suppressive Fire - longer mez duration.

Based on BFR's damage, you could state that it should have a 6 second (scale 1.32 blast recharge - see Dual Wield) recharge and should cost 6.864 endurance; looking at the Control primaries you get scale 1 damage and a larger scale (12 vs 8) hold on an 8 second recharge at 8.528 endurance. So why are any of those other powers at 20 second recharge and cost 10.192 endurance, let alone Bitter Freeze Ray at 15.184?

You haven't used Rain of Fire enough. The Scourge ticks do twice as much damage as the regular ticks, meaning that it is more effective than any other set.

Sonic is better for damage on a team because the -resistance boosts everybody's damage but Sonic Blast is better on a Defender than a Corruptor because -resistance is all it has going for it. Radiation is proc-friendly (as will be Water Blast), and Corruptor Rain of Arrows is only stronger than Defender Rain of Arrows if it Scourges because the pseudopet was created with the wrong AT modifier being used - if you want to talk about Archery go with the Blaster version.

I'm disappointed that they didn't get Defenders the faster animation when it was ported to them, and they never announced the change to the Corruptor version. I think that someone thought it was fixing a discrepancy rather than causing one, but I noticed it the first time I played Ice Blast after the change - which happened to be a while after it changed, since I was leveling other characters at the time.

An increase in damage on BFR would be nice, as would an increase in the hold duration, but given similar recharge mez powers in other sets (Stunning Shot, Beanbag, Suppressive Fire, Scramble Thoughts) and how they do negligible damage at (usually) shorter range, it probably isn't going to happen.

I'm talking about people selling PL services using disposable accounts to create farms, while someone who plans on keeping their account - and thus would be affected by account-based penalties - gets the rewards. They want the penalty of removing access to create missions and/or lock accounts for creating "egregious farms" to mean something.

Yes, there are tons of farms out there already. Yes, people can use those. No, I don't necessarily agree with the access restrictions. I'm merely trying to state what I believe someone else's justification is.

If you assume the other sets are at the cap also, then the only advantage SS could possibly have is how frequently you cycle Footstomp.

Citadel gives you fewer missions (both TFs have five defeat-all missions), the enemy group is boring but not annoying (lots of -recovery is annoying since recovery resistance is stupidly capped by level), and most importantly, more powers to use - up to your first epic power now!

It's not my favorite, either. But it's basically running repeated police scanner missions and selecting Council missions each time with an end-of-TF payout at the end, and I know people who will level just selecting Freakshow and Council scanner missions. They don't do the same by picking Clockwork through the teens.

Just throwing this out as a "buyer beware" - the 100% critical chance from hidden on Burst has been publicly acknowledged as a bug by the (at-the-time) lead powers developer, and that stance has been confirmed recently by the current lead powers developer via private message (when I asked if the same treatment could be given to all AoEs prior to the i21 changes).

That doesn't change the playstyle advice or other points made, and KM is still good on a Stalker. I'm just trying to keep people from taking Stalker KM only because they think that 100% crit chance on Burst is always going to be there so I don't have to see as many of the inevitable rage posts when it finally gets changed.

I'm not a redname and in no way claim to speak for them, but I would assume that getting rewards from AE happens earlier in the Paragon Rewards program because in order for those farms to exist for people to get rewards on, someone had to create them - and the devs probably want the people creating them to have to invest more in their account so that they aren't disposable.

Because they have acted to penalize the creation of farms in AE, but an account lock or permanent loss of AE mission slots penalty to a free account just means you create another free account and start again; once you put in the monetary investment to get to tier 6 the assumption is that it's not a disposable account.

Before the Team Mission transport I preferred Dr Q to Synapse. I only run Synapse to get TFC; I prefer the old Posi TF to it (and did even before you could keep powers above your exemp level) because at least in it there were different stupidly-annoying enemy groups and felt that the Synapse TF was more in need of a revamp.